Listening To Vinyl Compared To Cd

The cd versus vinyl debate and by extension the debate over digital versus analog sound has only grown.

Listening to vinyl compared to cd.

Taking both actual albums and track sales into account the equivalent of 243 5 million digital albums were sold last year compared to 165 4 million cds and 6 1 million vinyl records. Why vinyl sounds better than cd. In fact vinyl outsold cds for the first time since the 1980s according to a recently released mid year report from the. Original sound is analog by definition.

However that s not the whole story. A vinyl record is an analog recording and cds and dvds are digital recordings. Cds and vinyl records are both audio storage and playback formats based on rotating discs from different times in music history the cd audio is digitally encoded and read by a laser while analog vinyl audio is physically read by a needle. Vinyl always sounds better than cd.

If you re listening to a vinyl record cd or high quality digital file of the same song on a good stereo system you probably won t notice a lot of difference between what you re hearing unless. Take a look at the graph below. The answer lies in the difference between analog and digital recordings. One vinyl record may sound better than its equivalent cd for extremely specific reasons.

The rest of it dates back to sometime in the 1990s when the cd all but killed off vinyl in the first place. Comparison of a raw analog audio signal to the cd audio and dvd audio output. Americans seem to be listening to more vinyl records amid the pandemic. As described below despite decades of arguments there is no technical proof of the sonic superiority of the vinyl medium compared to cd.

Sure a lot of people simply enjoy the ritual of thumbing through physical media setting up the turntable and listening to a whole album. By 2014 vinyl s resurgence as a marketable product and fetish property appeared.